ANVITHA VIJAY – 9 Year Old Youngest App Developer at WWDC ‘16

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2016 started this Monday, 13th June. This event is one of the largest and most awaited events each year. This year we see 120 attendees who are under 18 years of age. Out of these 120 developers, Anvitha Vijay is a 9-year-old youngest app developer at WWDC.

The Indian origin Australian student, Anvitha Vijay is the youngest app developer for iOS at WWDC who has developed educational apps for kids, getting inspired from her toddler sister.

She had started learning how to code when she was only seven. And without any formal training, spending a year using only YouTube videos and free online tutorials she grasped it all. Anvitha has already built several apps for iPhone and iPad.

HER FIRST APP: GoalsHi

She built this app during her summer holidays and won a $10,000 student prize at the OzApp awards in Australia, 2015.

NOW:

She travelled with her family from Melbourne to San Francisco to attend WWDC 2016 after being selected at Apple’s scholarship program. This year out of the 350 recipients of the scholarship, 120 are under the age of 18 and 22 percent are women. She hopes to meet CEO Tim Cook during the event.

Smartkins Animals App:

Being her brainchild, this is really a simple yet interactive app. Focus of this application is for helping kids identify over 100 animals with their names and sounds.

Smartkins Rainbow Colours:

Another simplistic app designed by Anvitha to help young kids learn about colours.

HER FOCUS:

Her major focus is to develop educational apps for children for which her inspiration has been her toddler sister who was learning to talk and identify animals. It involved a lot of hard work from Anvitha’s side to understand coding and develop the apps. “There are so many components to building an app, including prototyping, design and wire framing, user interface design and then coding and testing,” Anvitha said.